Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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26.4.12

Obama budget blows to LA subvert his fiscal agenda

Louisiana can’t help that Pres. Barack Obama
served up a one-two punch to the state’s economy. What can be dealt with is its
response, with some clues as to what that might be.

The state’s Revenue Estimating Conference met Tuesday to ratify that in
the fewer than 70 days left in this fiscal year the state was short $210.5
million on what it had been budgeted for. Even with that lower baseline, it
also said next year’s budget would still have to be constructed with $92.8
million less than even that, compared to the previous forecast.

It’s not that the state’s revenues aren’t increasing, it’s just that these
effects continue to drag on the state’s economic performance, dampening those
revenue increases from their higher forecast. Exacerbating the impact is the
state, because of an economy disproportionately weighed towards what may be
considered more “traditional” and low value-added sectors that grow more slowly
with less in the way of potential productivity gains, tends to enter and exit
recessions later. That spells bad news in Louisiana for a recovery that at the national
level is the weakest in decades.

For now, Louisianans have to take these hits and its policy-makers have
to figure out a way to deal with this unfavorable political environment’s fiscal
consequences. In the short run, with Gov. Bobby
Jindal and his administration saying they wish to protect the two major
areas left without constitutional and legal protection from cuts beyond one or
five percent, health care and higher education, by the usual strategies of cost
containment (as in last
month’s executive order) and hiring freezes (continued from an order
of last year, which has dropped full-time equivalent employment of state
executive branch workers from about 78,800
in number and $3.9 billion in annual payroll to about 76,600
and $3.8 billion). Whether these can do the trick is another matter,
leaving only one other way of making up the difference – yet another fund
sweep.

This latter may run into political problems because of the House rule
that mandates the extra “one-time” money from the fund sweep could be only
$147.5 million without a supermajority – if that much even can be extracted in
surplus cash. Again, this points to the need for reforms in ridding the state
of its plethora of dedicated funds that hamper
the state’s ability to set priorities and fund by genuine need. Whether
because of politics or lack of surplus cash, if the combination with spending
cutbacks by executive order or by the mid-year deficit reduction process all
together doesn’t add up to the desired figure, health care and higher education
will get hit again.

Whatever happens, it means smaller state government, creating a
fascinating irony. Obama supporters generally favor his policies of bigger,
more intrusive government, but these policies in large part have set the state
up to seek smaller, right-sized government. The continuing, beneficial
transformation is welcome regardless of its origins and remains the silver
lining to stressful budgetary conditions.

sadow conveniently fails to mention that petro-production in the gom bottomed out in 2008; extraction was slowed by the implosion of the economy due to the bush admin, not obama's policies.busy constructing his polemic from fantasyland, sadow seems oblivious that the same general idiotological 'givens' that conservos use as a baseline in fantasyland are the same seeds of disaster that reaped obvious yields by the louisiana state budget from year 1--massive budget cuts as a result of budgetary shortfalls from tax cuts and giveaways. that they expected the cuts would cause a flood of revenue from increased jobs+spending jsut shows that they never learn, or worse, secretly knew that the cuts would stifle revenue streams, so they could use this excuse to go after pensions, health insurance, teacher tenure, etc.how many times does this nonsense have to play out before the sadow's of the world wake up and realize that their assumptions are disastrously wrong?

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